Most disease involves a variety of changes in the human body. For example, cancers, viral and bacterial illnesses, genetic conditions, and other ailments generally involve a variety of changes in metabolic systems and biomolecule behavior. As is known in the detection of sepsis, looking at a single biomarker is often not accurate in detecting the condition; analyzing several discreet biomarkers on the other hand may give stronger clues to the possibility of septic shock in a subject.
While monitoring multiple biomarkers may be appealing for accurate disease diagnostics, tracking two or more biomarkers can be a technical challenge, and furthermore, monitoring of the level, expression, or concentration of the biomarkers may be confounded by other conditions leading to the same or different observations. Biomarker proteins may also contain information related to a disease process in their three-dimensional structure and/or interaction with other ligands. The ideal diagnostic system for cancer and other serious illness would therefore allow for a single technical protocol to be applied to a biological sample, wherein structural information related to two or more biomarkers could be worked up in parallel and quickly analyzed for differences related to the underlying disease or condition.